The Darkening Hour

by Penny Hancock

  Angered that he was losing his day’s earnings, and humiliated by the way the visitors had rejected him, Ali left, then returned to the kasbah in a stolen car. Spotting Driss in his wing mirror, emerging with his posse of tourists from one of the alleys, he reversed towards him. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone, Ali told me, just to scare the other guide, to give him a shock. One of the tourists must have stepped out at the last minute. He heard the thump, Ali said. It had been such a violent blow the car shook.

  People had come out of their doors, shouting, chasing the car as he accelerated down the street. He could do nothing but drive away, keeping his head down.

  He knew the tourist was probably dead. He also knew that no one had seen him. He argued that, in the end, the fault lay not with him but with Driss.

  And he begged me to hide him. To keep quiet. ‘Or I’ll lose my place at medical school!’ he wept. And so I kept quiet and have kept quiet ever since. For him.

  I wonder now what really happened to Max. If it was an accident, why was Theodora so afraid?

  I should have ignored her, called the emergency number again when I slipped into Charles’s flat, before we moved Max. Taken the situation into my own hands and done what I knew was right.

  I did what she told me to do out of fear.

  I am overcome by shame at my own cowardice.

  I think of Ali. It was different with him. With Ali, I wanted to protect him. I couldn’t face life without him.

  The thoughts swirl about my head, flashing in and out, on and off until I feel I’ll go mad. I knew what we did was wrong, but where would it have left Leila and Ummu if I’d crossed Dora? What extremes would she go to if she knew I was betraying her?

  I am not free to weigh up moral pros and cons while I am tied to her.

  A ray of sun pokes into the room, making a patch of yellow light dance and flicker on my thin covers. I think of how the morning might have been. Of Max’s plea, that I should buy croissants and flowers for Dora and bring them to her in bed. She would have been happy, and a nicer woman to work for.

  The way things have gone, she will never know this. Instead of the romantic morning that awaited her, she has lost her lover forever.

  I reach in my tracksuit pocket for the money Max gave me to buy breakfast and the extra to send home. It’s gone. Not surprising, with the contortions and efforts we had to make to get his body into the water. I imagine it working its way out of my pocket as we held him against the wall. Somehow it is this tiny loss that finally fills me with despair, for when will I ever have enough for Ummu’s operation?

  All I can do is get up, carry on, pretend – as Dora has forced me to do – that nothing happened, and hope that Dora will continue to pay me.

  Max never came here. He never died. We never put him in the river.

  I get off the floor and throw on as many layers of clothing as I can find. I even borrow a cardigan from Charles and wrap that around me. The tracksuit bottoms are damp but I have nothing else except a flimsy skirt that gives no warmth.

  I pull them on, look about automatically for the overall Dora insists I wear, and realise with shock that it’s gone; that it’s wrapped around Max’s bleeding head in the murky River Thames. I’ll have to fetch the spare one from the laundry room upstairs.

  I go to the window, pull back the curtains. Look out. Everything is covered in a layer of white, the steps, the small part of the garden I can see from down below. Snow.

  The light spills in. I stand, my eyes screwed tight shut against the bright sun dazzling off the white. When I open them again, my breath has formed a white veil against the glass. I rub a circle in it. The birdbath in the garden is caked in a thick tier of snow. The bird with the red breast pecks hopelessly at it. There’s a gap at the top of the steps where the statue was.

  I go to Charles, find he has wet his bedding again.

  ‘Come on, Charles. Let me make you comfortable.’

  He’s become more irascible lately, more confused.

  I get him up, lead him to the bathroom, wash him and dress him in clean clothes. He’s unwell. I’m certain he needs a doctor. I go to his tiny kitchen to make him some breakfast while he sits in his chair, but when I take it to him he turns his mouth away. Refuses to eat.

  What will become of me if he dies?

  I see my future narrowing, as if I’m descending the flight of stone stairs into the dark river, my freedom swallowed up. I remind myself that Leila’s future is growing in direct opposition, broadening, her opportunities becoming clearer and brighter until she has the world at her fingertips. And this is enough to keep me strong.

  I clear up Charles’s dishes ready to take back to the kitchen, and that’s when my eye falls on the little jewelry box Max showed me in the night. It’s lying on the floor near the doorway. He must have dropped it when he slipped and fell on the steps.

  I pick it up, press the tiny button so its lid flips open and there it is, with its diamond encrusting the little locket and its beautiful gold chain.

  I know I should give it to Dora straight away, but something – some sense that this thing with Max has not quite ended, is simmering and will at some point erupt – makes me slip it into my tracksuit pocket. We put a body in the river. The river will return its dead. The crime will revisit us. And then what will I do?

  I tug off Charles’s sheets and gather up all the soiled laundry. Then I open the door to a blast of cold and move up the steps. The snow makes a strange creaking sound beneath my feet. At the top, I stand for a minute. The garden, the railings, the houses beyond are all beautiful, white, like the houses in the Kasbah des Oudaias, as if coated in a thick layer of icing. Several centimetres of snow lie on the top of every branch, soft like the almond blossoms on the trees that day Ali and I threw husks down on our teacher.

  I move round to the front of the house. Even the wheelie bins look pretty with their white layer. The good and the bad all evened out by the snow, all made as one. All the blood and mess from Max’s fall, gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Christmas Eve is a calm day in our street, made more so by the snow that lies on the ground. It is as if nature has taken it into her own hands to cover up any wrongdoing, a soft hand of forgiveness.

  I go to my bedroom window and look down upon the silent street. The angels wear thick white halos.

  Mona and I seem more harmonious together than we’ve ever been.

  I have Max’s things to remember him by. I open the case he left in my room with care. My fingers caress his shirts, his underwear, all such good quality, all smelling of him. I put my nose to them and breathe.

  ‘Mona,’ I say, ‘I don’t want you to talk to anyone outside this house. No one must know Max came here – Leo especially, when he comes home. You may of course talk to Daddy, but that is all. When you go to the shops, you will keep quiet. If you don’t do as I say, you’ll be in serious trouble. I can call the police any time and tell them what happened to Max and have you removed. But I won’t, not if you do everything I tell you.’

  Mona looks at me with awe, and I realise she respects me now in the way she always should have done, the way the women respect their employers in Roger’s world.

  When Christmas Day comes, Mona cooks and we sit and eat together, me and Daddy, and Mona brings us each course, but Daddy soon tires and asks to be taken back to his flat to sleep.

  Over the following days I work Mona hard.

  She is to sleep every night down with Daddy, on the floor, using the cushions from the sofa if she so wishes. But she must not make herself too comfortable, for then she won’t want to get up in the night if he needs her, or for her morning’s work. I do not want her in my study any longer. This is to be my space again, where I can relax. I have made too many sacrifices over the last few months, allowing Mona to take over that room and Leo the drawing room. This is my house.

  It’s right to have Mona downstairs; she must understand that her place is beneath me.

  When
she complains that she has backache, I lose patience with her. I don’t want her going to the doctor’s, discussing her ailments.

  ‘Registering for the doctors here takes forever. You may buy painkillers with your wages,’ and I scribble down the names of some common ones on a piece of paper. ‘You can buy them at the chemist when you go for Daddy’s medicine.’

  She stands up and makes an ostentatious show of rubbing her back.

  ‘The best thing for your back is to keep moving, keep working,’ I say.

  And so Mona works silently for me doing as I say without objecting. It’s how it’s meant to be.

  ‘Dora,’ she tries. ‘I’m worried Charles is getting very weak. I think we need the doctor.’

  If this is a ploy, another desperate attempt on her part to reveal secrets to the outside world, she isn’t going to get away with it.

  ‘We don’t need the doctor,’ I tell her. ‘Max told you, didn’t he? That Daddy is OK.’

  Once or twice I feel a jolt. It’s usually when my mobile pings and a text comes in and I wonder for an instant, with a flicker of excitement, whether it is from Max.

  Then instead of disappointment I feel a strange kind of relief. I no longer need to go through the agony of separation each time we meet. I no longer need to worry about how short-lived our meetings will be, or whether I will be able to get away in time to meet him. I no longer need to worry that he would rather be with Valerie, or worse, with Mona.

  I don’t feel lonely either, for I know Mona’s there, a silent presence in the basement. When I wake up afraid, haunted by the sight of Max, his head against the doorframe at that odd angle, his face gazing up at me with his empty eyes, I go to the dumbwaiter shaft and call Mona to me. And I ask her to sit with me until I fall asleep.

  I’m in the kitchen one evening before New Year, drinking my martini at the table while Mona scrubs the tiles around the sink, when the phone rings. It’s Rachel. She tells me they do indeed want me to run a new cookery programme. It is due to go out in late spring.

  ‘We had a major rethink. Cooking’s the one thing that’s escaping the recession,’ she laughs down the phone. ‘Everyone’s desperate to learn about it, though no one actually does it. The faster cookery books sell out, the more restaurants open up so people can eat out. It’s a strange phenomenon but one we’re going to cash in on. And you’re going to be at the forefront. We all feel you can be relaunched, Dora: you’ve got the voice, and we can develop the domestic image, do a little bit of chat about your favourite kitchen implements and so on.’

  When I put the phone down, I’m overcome by a mixture of relief and remorse.

  ‘Good news?’ Mona asks, looking at me.

  I can’t answer. The conversation has released a barrage of emotion I must have been keeping at bay. Max will never see me in my new role!

  And this regret precipitates others, not just grief over Max’s death, but the strain of keeping our affair secret from his wife. Most of all, that it has seemed easier to have him out of my life completely, than live with the constant insecurity that I wouldn’t see him again.

  I wait, as the tears come down.

  I don’t want Mona to see me crying.

  I turn my face from her.

  ‘Go, Mona,’ I gasp. ‘Go away for a minute.’

  She doesn’t move.

  ‘I’ll get you a tissue,’ she says, keeping her face still, unemotional.

  ‘No need.’ I’m sobbing now, my chest heaving.

  She won’t go away.

  Then she speaks.

  ‘I understand how you feel.’

  ‘You have no idea how I feel.’

  ‘I do. That you lost your lover. It’s a terrible thing.’

  I look up at her. Her words belie the rigid expression on her face. What is she really thinking?

  ‘You don’t understand, Mona.’ I wipe my eyes, take a deep breath. ‘It’s not just grief over Max, the terrible accident that killed him. It’s the strain of all these years of secrecy. Uncertainty. Playing second fiddle to his wife.’

  ‘Second fiddle?’

  ‘Of course! Never being the most important person in his life. However hard I tried.’

  Now I’ve started, I can’t stop.

  ‘You’ve no idea the sorrow I have carried around. That I could never have Max completely. How hard I’ve worked, to be the person for whom I thought he would leave his wife. How much I yearned that one day, we would live together in one house, sleeping together every night. And now, he’ll never know that I’m to present a cookery programme during one of the prime morning slots.’

  I want to tell her it’s also sorrow that I could never be the person Daddy loved the best, that I’ve never lived up to the person he or Mummy wanted me to be.

  But I stop myself.

  ‘And now he’s dead.’

  Enormous sobs wrack my body. For quite some time I let emotion take over, give in to the almost luxurious release of tears.

  At last I arrive at a kind of empty, silent place, void of all feeling.

  ‘Go now,’ I say to her. ‘Make the beds, do the laundry. Leave me.’

  Instead, she speaks.

  ‘You are wrong about Max,’ she says. Her words come out quietly. I’m not sure I want to hear what she’s going to tell me. Did Max try, after all, to seduce her, that night down in the basement? Did he confide in her about his other lovers, in other cities, scattered across the globe? Did she steal Max’s affection from me as well as Daddy’s, and my son’s? She’s going to tell me that I am nothing.

  But she goes on before I can stop her.

  ‘Max asked me to bring you a special breakfast in bed. He said he wanted to come and live with you, if you would let him. He loved you very much. He was leaving his wife for you. It is so very sad that then he had this terrible accident.’

  Before I know it, I’ve lifted my hand – and the slap I’d wanted to give her the day Max came back resounds loudly on her face.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  The snow lies on the ground for three or four days, then one morning I awake and it’s gone, leaving the garden exposed, all the ugly bits returned. The grotesque wheelie bins, the stone bust with its nose broken off now, the black twigs and branches overhead.

  My face smarts after the slap Dora gave me last night. I look in the mirror. It’s left a red mark across my cheekbone.

  I don’t want to see her this morning, so I spend longer than usual giving Charles his breakfast and wait until I hear the front door slam to go upstairs to an empty house.

  I hear the postman arrive, and a letter drops on the doormat with a Moroccan stamp on it.

  I recognise Hait’s writing.

  Dear Mona,

  I’m dictating this to Hait as it’s hard to speak on the phone when Leila’s little ears are flapping. We nearly have enough for the operation now. It’s not looking good. The doctors say there’s a chance it will be effective, but only a chance. I haven’t told Leila, but I have had to convince her that the treats have to stop. The cost of this treatment is phenomenal! And she’s been very grown up about it.

  She does ask for you. But I explain that you have to work in England so I can get better and so she can one day have a good education, earn money so she will not have to go away from her own children to work. She accepts this.

  And remember, after five years, you may apply for citizenship. It seems a long time, but it will go quickly now you have a good placement with Theodora. Leila sends a drawing she has done with some new pens I have been able to buy for her. Don’t worry that all the animals she draws have sad faces – she’s going through a phase where she always draws down-turned mouths!

  Ring me soon.

  I send you love and blessings, my dear daughter.

  Ummu xx

  I put her letter down. Fold it in half.

  I then go through to the study, the room that used to be my bedroom, and look out of the window.

  The bust of the woman’s head is b
ack at the top of the steps. The one that killed Max. For a while, I sit down and stare at a small bird with a red breast that has landed on top of it.

  Endymion, the cat, sits beneath, batting at it with its paw. I watch, astonished, as the bird continues to sit, oblivious to its predator. Endymion squats, ready to pounce, and as he leaps, the bird flies off into the winter sky.

  I think how, if Leila were drawing the cat and the bird, they would both have down-turned mouths, the predator and its prey as sad as each other.

  When I’ve finished cleaning I go back to Charles.

  He is a little better, insisting he needs to go out, to buy fruit, buy his paper.

  I have to wait until it’s growing dark. Dora’s instructed me not to speak to anyone. This was unnecessary. I never do speak to anyone, except Sayed, and I haven’t been back to his shop since I failed to turn up to the meeting he arranged, too ashamed to admit my papers had gone, that I had no money.

  I wear my blue anorak, hood up over my headscarf, pulling the collar of my fleece up as far as I can so it conceals my face. And I keep my head down, as I wheel Charles to the High Street. The street is a little subdued now the Christmas festival is over, its usual noise and movement reduced, though the stalls are still open and women gather to fill their bags with produce.

  I pay for Charles’s clementines without making eye-contact with the stallholder. I buy him a paper. Sayed isn’t in his shop today; it’s someone I haven’t seen before who doesn’t speak, just gives me my change without looking.

  The snow is now a grey slush along the pavements; the air is raw and cold.

  We pass people I know so well by sight, but with whom I’ve never exchanged a word. The guy in the luminous jacket who sweeps the road, the skinny girl with the old woman’s face selling magazines, the group of youths in hoods huddled around the money-exchange kiosk. We pass the chef who often stands outside a door left open to ease the heat of a steamy kitchen beneath street-level.